Freeway Free in Scotland: Another Bloody Battlefield
Why do we yearn over battlefields and lost causes? At the Battle of Gettysburg, the High Water Mark of the Confederacy gets more photos than any other monument. Even on our cruise in Alaska we toured a battlefield – the last stand of the Kwakiutls or some such. We are in awe of places where lots of young men died for reasons they and we no longer understand. And here we are at Culloden, where young Scotsmen in kilts wielded swords and battle axes against British cannon and riflery, and died bravely for a prince who escaped the carnage and lived out a wastrel life in Italy. .
Culloden is a beautiful place on a bright summer day, a broad pasture stippled with swathes of greenery and shrubbery, sweeping off to distant hills and a blue sky studded with white clouds. And then you notice the clan markers, where the bodies of slain Scotsmen were heaped into trenches and covered over with earth. No individual markers for the Scots, just a stone with the clan name. And maybe the bodies underneath match the name, or maybe not.
The Culloden Battlefield has one of the best visual representations of slaughter that I have seen. We are told 50 Englishmen died vs. 2500+ Scots. That seems like a lot. Then we see the wall – the extruded bricks represent a death. – 20 feet of bricks represent the Royalist deaths – another 10 feet are flat, then 1250 feet represent the Scotch deaths.
You see, you understand.
Allyson Johnson 